With October now beginning, I took a moment to reflect and realized that I’m doing a lot of learning things. I’m currently doing courses for my driver’s license, I’m taking Dutch courses, I have a Power BI course in about two weeks, and I’m learning how to play the guitar. Not to mention I’m continuing my courses on Proko and also splurged for Alan Moore’s BBC Maestro series, which I can heartily recommend for his voice and humor alone.
When I start things I tend to start a bunch of related stuff at the same time so I do need to take a quick step back and slow my roll a bit. I think this is enough for the moment and it was actually quite nice to reflect and realize that I’m actually ‘doing things.’
On the art side, I posted a couple of pieces. I really got into Captain America and once I bought the first Omnibus I started collecting them all (see what I mean from the above?) Suddenly, I was digging into his history and really going through the comics about a character I really didn’t know much about outside of the MCU fans. And a lot of what I read surprised. With a character called Captain America you would think it would be a very patriotic character representing a country that can do no wrong. This was far from the case. The writer’s really explored that concept of him and put him in conflict with the United States government. The classic stories very much culminated with Steve Englehart’s run, which was during the Watergate scandal. There are some shocking scenes in there.
I tried to pay homage to Jack Kirby’s depiction of the guy, when he was jumping in the air, down the air, and around the air. He was basically a gymnast. And for this reason I purposely gave him rather thick legs. The drawing is a bit stiff to me but it’s showing some progression.
Next up is something that I really enjoyed doing and that is one of my characters from expatNERD, Curt, about to be mauled by Shako. Shako is a polar bear that swallowed a top-secret capsule developed by the CIA and the CIA swoop in to try to retrieve it by killing him or course. But that does not happen and Shako ends up killing everyone else. It’s quite graphic, especially for the time as it was released during the launch of 2000ad.
I also keep misspelling Shako and spell it Shacko. I don’t know why and had to edit the social media posts this week as well as this one.
I do like this one because I wanted to create a very dramatic and overexagerated movement in Shako’s swing as well as to express some genuine terror in Curt’s face. I was hoping that 2000ad would at least do a repost or a ‘like’ but sadly they didn’t. I better keep practicing.
That’s it for this week! And remember, always have a healthy distrust of your government but don’t turn into a raving conspiracy theorist.
-Chris
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